National (U.S.)

"Hundreds of U.S. EPA employees are heading for the exits after the agency offered a round of buyout and early retirement packages."

"It may cost up to $2 billion to clean up toxic firefighting chemicals that have leaked from more than 400 U.S. military installations, including Fairchild Air Force Base, a group of Democratic senators said Tuesday in a letter to the Senate Appropriations Committee."

"A wet winter and spring in the Western U.S. brought predictions that the 2017 wildfire season would be mild. It was anything but. It ended up one of the worst in U.S. history in land burned."

"Less than two weeks after Hurricane Harvey started pummeling the Texas Gulf Coast, the House overwhelmingly approved a nearly $7.9 billion recovery aid package on Wednesday for Texas and neighboring Louisiana."

"Hurricane Irma hammered a string of northeast Caribbean islands, thrashing them with rain and winds of up to 180 mph, and leaving at least nine people dead."

"Vaccine giant Sanofi Pasteur has quietly pulled the plug on its Zika vaccine project, a move that underscores how difficult it may be at this stage to develop a vaccine against the virus."

"When his investigators dug into corruption allegations at a Superfund site, Oklahoma State Auditor Gary Jones believed they'd found criminal wrongdoing. But Scott Pruitt, then Oklahoma's attorney general, didn't agree with Jones about activities at the Tar Creek site. In 2015, a little more than a year after getting Jones' report, he said he wouldn't bring criminal charges."

"Wildfires burned across hundreds of thousands of acres in the American and Canadian West this week, fueled by scorching temperatures that are breaking heat and fire records across the region." "'These unprecedented extreme events are exactly the types of events that are more likely due to the global warming that’s already occurred.'"

"The tug of war over how much more fuel efficient new cars and trucks should be in coming years — a fight that once seemed all but settled — will play out again on Wednesday in a downtown Washington hotel."

"The Environmental Protection Agency has taken the unusual step of putting a political operative in charge of vetting the hundreds of millions of dollars in grants the EPA distributes annually, assigning final funding decisions to a former Trump campaign aide with little environmental policy experience."